Mailing List

Events Calendar

Search for content

CHOW DOWN & RISE UP!

Submitted by KAT on Fri, 08/11/2006 - 6:24am.

Welcome to Eating Liberally, the website with an appetite for activism. Our democracy may be eroding like an arctic glacier, but there’s hope; people-powered politics is rising up even faster than our sea levels.

Ned Lamont’s victory over Joe Leiberman this week was a triumph for grassroots democracy, but the battle’s just beginning, and we’ve got to nurture this nascent movement in every way we can.

Thanks to Drinking Liberally, thirsty progressives all over the country get together each week to foment social change over fermented beverages. But we sensed, well, a hunger for a little more sustenance. The netroots need feeding!

So Eating Liberally invites you to take a break from the blogosphere and break bread with your netroots neighbors. Get a roomful of Kossacks, MyDD devotees and Atrios addicts together and you’ve got a virtual wonky wind farm. We can harness that energy to bring about real change.

And it’s contagious; it’s viral. The Bush cavalcade of cronyism, incompetence and corruption is not just on the wrong track, it’s driving our democracy right off a cliff, and that’s galvanizing people who’ve been apathetic or downright allergic to politics. We need to stir those embers and get people fired up. You can start by joining, or forming, a chapter of Eating Liberally. We’re launching the first Eating Liberally chapter in New York City next Tuesday, August 15th, so if you’re in the neighborhood, we’d love you to join us, from 6:30 to 8:30 at Rudy’s, 627 9th Avenue (bet. 44th st. & 45th st.)

The website’s still under construction, so please bear with us while we work on links and compile resources. Eating Liberally will offer a forum to talk about food, politics, and the politics of food. Is Industrial Organic an oxymoron? Is it always better to buy local? Should soda be banned from schools? We’ll serve up a full menu of entries about the issues of the day.

Meanwhile, peak oil prophets like James Kunstler warn that trucking produce across the continent or flying it in from foreign lands is not a sustainable way to put food on our plates. Instead of burying our heads in the sand--hoping, perhaps, to find more oil there-- we’d do better to seek new solutions to our energy needs and encourage greater efforts to conserve our finite resources.

There are tangible things you can do to make a difference, from supporting local agriculture by buying your food at the farmers’ market or joining a CSA, to leaving your car at home, when you can, and opting to walk, bike or ride mass transit instead, where possible. And we’ll be glad to give you guidance if you’d like to grow your own greens, too. We here at Eating Liberally hope to inspire, inform, and interact with fellow progressives who share our concerns and want to grow the grassroots—organically, of course!